OpenDarwin Shuts Its Doors

By Steven Vaughan-Nichols |
Posted 2006-07-28

What happens if you open an operating system but no developers come? The answer is: The project eventually dies. Thats exactly what has happened to the OpenDarwin project. Darwin is the foundation of Mac OS X.

Darwin, in turn, is built on top of Mach 3.0 operating system services, which run on top of BSD 4.0 Unix. OpenDarwin, as you might guess, is the open-source version of Darwin.

The plan for OpenDarwin was to provide resources for open-source developers to interact and produce products for Mac OS X. One of the key aspects of the project was to enable interested Mac OS X developers to be able to retrieve, modify, build and distribute operating system changes.

The important word turned out to be "interested."

According to an announcement on the OpenDarwin Web site, "Availability of sources, interaction with Apple representatives, difficulty building and tracking sources, and a lack of interest from the community have all contributed to this" decision.